Colorado School of Mines ranked number one engineering school in U.S.

The “M” overlooks the School of Mines campus (Provided By School of Mines)

It’s a good year to be an Oredigger. Colorado School of Mines was recently ranked as the top engineering school in the country.

College Factual recently released a list of 281 engineering schools, and Golden’s Colorado School of Mines earned the top spot, beating out notable institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Also, the school announced that it just completed its most successful fundraising year with $47.8 million in gifts and $24.4 million in private non-governmental research funding.

Part of what makes Colorado School of Mines’ engineering program so successful is the school’s close relationship with engineering’s private industry and the high concentration of students looking for a degree within STEM fields.

According to Peter Han, the college’s chief of staff, School of Mines works closely with the private industry to not only enrich the student experience but also to draw companies to hire out of Mines. More than 40 percent of sponsored research awards are funded by private industry.

Han also said that more than 98 percent of undergraduate degrees are for engineering or an applied science field. This enables Mines faculty to coordinate their curriculums so that the topics covered in scientific fields synergize with one another.

Of the $47.8 million in gifts the school received, half of the money is going to capital projects. Nine percent will go to faculty, 10 percent to scholarships, 25 percent to department support and campus initiatives. The remaining six percent will go to the Clear Creek Athletics Complex and the construction of a Welcome Center among other projects.

You comment on the fact that it’s only because of the amount of mining/pet engineers that they churn out like it is something to dismiss. I think the real point that you are missing is that these degrees are sought after by many of the top corporations worldwide and that Mines has positioned itself as one of the “go to” colleges for these disciplines. A quick glance at the companies that attend and actively hire at career fair would undoubtedly solidify this conjecture.

Absolutely that happens. Particularly in the oil industry. MIT doesn’t really have a petroleum engineering department to speak of, and Mines has hands-down the best petroleum engineering department in the world.

I work for an engineering consulting firm (Senior Engineer) and I am involved in the hiring decisions in the engineering department. The MIT grads we have had have been disappointing. In the petroleum industry you can’t just be an engineer; you have to be a project manager, you have to be practical, and have to have a fairly substantial understanding of economics. The MIT grads seemed to lack these things. They were not versatile enough. They were okay engineers, but if I have to explain to you how to get at different discount rates to use in time value of money calculations for differing types of companies, then we have a problem.

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